Newark Seeks to Fill Booker Vacuum as Mayoral Bus Burns

A speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention who was elected to the Senate in October, Cory Booker revitalized the city by attracting donations from billionaires including Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and investments for schools, downtown hotels, houses and offices. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- After seven years of Cory Booker,
Newark will choose its first mayor in a race in which one
candidate has criticized his opponent for ties to moneyed Wall
Street interests and supporters of the other were charged with
setting fire to a campaign bus.

Shavar Jeffries, a professor and former assistant attorney
general, counts among his supporters Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund
manager, who gave the maximum of $26,000. Ras Baraka, a former
high school principal who served as an aide to disgraced Mayor
Sharpe James, serves as a city councilman.

With Booker now representing New Jersey in the U.S. Senate
and the term of his temporary replacement, City Council
President Luis Quintana, coming to an end, the May 13 election
represents a crossroads for Newark. Even after its biggest
period of economic growth in five decades, the city of 280,000
has yet to fully recover from five nights of shootings and
looting in July 1967 that left 26 people dead and leveled whole
neighborhoods. One in four city residents lives in poverty.

“There’s a big vacuum right now,” said Senator Ron Rice,
who represents Newark in Trenton, the state capital, and was a
deputy mayor under Booker’s predecessor, James. “This is going
to be a total regrouping.”

Booker, 44, a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law
School, built a national persona as mayor by rushing into a
burning building to rescue a neighbor and living on food stamps
for a week to show how hard it was to rely on the government
nutrition program.

Population Gain

A speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention who
was elected to the Senate in October, Booker revitalized the
city by attracting donations from billionaires including
Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and investments for
schools, downtown hotels, houses and offices. In the 2010 U.S.
Census, Newark posted its first population gain in six decades.

For all Booker’s progress during his tenure, Newark’s
median household income of $34,387 from 2008-2012 was less than
half the figure for New Jersey as a whole. While 66 percent of
state residents own a home, in Newark the rate is 24 percent.
Its 28 percent poverty rate compares with 9.9 percent statewide.

“Whoever wins will have to forge their own path, so this
really is a defining moment for Newark,” said Brigid Harrison,
a professor of law and politics at Montclair State University.
“Neither of them would be able to replicate his style.”

Bus Fire

Jeffries was raised by his grandmother, a school teacher,
after his mother was murdered. He attended Newark public schools
until he received a Boys and Girls Club scholarship to attend
Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange. He graduated from
Duke University and received his law degree from Columbia
University.

Jeffries served on the Newark Public Schools Advisory Board
and is an advocate of charter schools to provide higher-quality
education in urban neighborhoods. He was the founding board
president of TEAM Academy, the largest public charter school in
New Jersey.

Two people who worked on Jeffries’ campaign staff were
charged with arson for allegedly setting a small fire in
February aboard Baraka’s campaign bus. Prosecutors said Shareef
Nash, a field coordinator for the campaign, and Michael
Benkowski, a canvasser, ignited the parked bus and poured sugar
into the gas tank to render it inoperable. Jeffries denied any
prior knowledge of the act and cut ties with the campaign
workers. Nash and Benkowski couldn’t be reached for comment.

Poet’s Son

Baraka served as deputy mayor under James from 2002 until
2005, when the city council voted for him to fill a vacancy. His
candidacy for mayor has been endorsed by organized labor,
including Local 1199 of the Service Employees International
Union, the New Jersey Laborers Union, liberal activists and
politicians including former Mayor Kenneth Gibson, Senator
Richard Codey, Ron Rice and Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker.

Baraka’s father, Amiri Baraka, who died in January, was a
writer of black nationalist poetry and fiction. He was poet
laureate of New Jersey in 2002 and 2003 until the position was
abolished by the New Jersey legislature amid controversy after
Baraka publicly read a poem about the September 2001 terrorist
attacks that some regarded as anti-Semitic.

Among Baraka’s supporters is James, who received a hero’s
welcome upon his return to the city following an 18-month prison
term for a 2008 conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges for
steering $46,000 in city-owned property to his mistress.

Wall Street

In television ads paid for by an outside political action
committee, Baraka supporters have criticized Jeffries for his
ties to Wall Street, including Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital
Management LP, and his support for charter schools. Jeffries, in
turn, has called Baraka a union-compromised retread who
represents the bad old days of the city’s machine politics. Each
of the mayoral candidates is running with an eight-member city
council slate.

For years, Newark languished as a gritty repository of
poverty smashed up against an airport, waterfront, and the New
Jersey Turnpike in Manhattan’s shadow. Corruption, crime and an
insular grain of politics were its noteworthy products.

Both candidates see those same areas as Newark’s greatest
assets. Jeffries, who served as a special counsel to the state
attorney general from 2007-09, calls Baraka a throwback to the
political patronage and back-room deals of the city during
James’ tenure.

“He’ll transact the city into financial ruin,” Jeffries
said in an interview. “The folks who are supporting him frankly
are some of the old-guard figures who got the city into the
current situation.”

‘Fiscal Distress’

Jeffries, 39, said public safety needs to be addressed
before the city can expect to move forward. Both men said they
see the need to move Newark to becoming a 24-hour city and said
they hope to draw on the presence of Rutgers University, the New
Jersey Institute of Technology and Essex County Community
College as wellsprings of growth.

Newark lacks a 2014 budget and faces a $34 million gap in
its current $640 million plan, prompting the state to declare
that the city is facing “fiscal distress.” On March 17,
Moody’s Investors Service put it on review for a possible
downgrade from its A3 rating, four levels above junk, citing the
possibility the city may come under formal state oversight
because of the budget delay.

On Newark’s gritty Broad Street, its main business
corridor, the air hung heavy on a recent day with the smell of
incense burned by street vendors. Makeshift stands offered
everything from hats and gloves to DVDs.

Baraka, 44, who was elected to council in 2010, said his
plan for Newark’s economy features a home-grown approach that
favors city residents, emphasizing neighborhoods, at the same
time it advances outside investment of the kind seen under
Booker.

“What the theme is about is a resurgence of Newark and
move it forward and how do we bring Newark back from a situation
it’s been in since essentially 1967,” he said. “What we’ve
desperately needed for a long time is a resurgence of these
neighborhoods. We need neighborhood development to take place.”